Quote:
“While the ambivalence promoted by the style enforces an awareness of alternative positions, opening avenues of enquiry rather than inculcating unambiguous moral truths, the imagery, with its insistence upon duality, contributes to the movement away from finality or closure by projecting a view of all aspects of experience as ambivalent and inherently unstable. “
Interesting article, Mark, but one still wonders, reverting to the general subject of this discussion, what someone who can perpetrate a jawbreaking sentence like this would know (or care?) about cadence and compression, or what she finds so admirable in:
“Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe”).
I think “euphusitic” means a highly elaborate way of writing or speaking, but, except in the form of mockery or satire it is hardly effective, much less attractive, prose.
I would say that devious political speeches or academic-type writing of the quality of the above are valuable examples of what to avoid (unless you are a politician, etc.) Prose style was an integral part of the power of essayists s like Addison, Hazlitt and Swift and they plainly gave attention to sound and cadence. Storytelling ability and character creation must be supreme in fiction, and no amount of good prose can make up for the lack of these. If a writer can show character in action effectively and also write as well as, for example, Saul Bellow or James Joyce, or translate Chekov as supremely well as Constance Garnett did, then you are likely to have great and compelling prose. It is interesting how cadenced even apparently artless prose like this is:
“I’ll tell you what did my father in. The third thing was Dummy, that Dummy died.
The first thing was Pearl Harbour. And the second thing was moving to my grandfather’s farm near Wenatchee. That’s where my father finished out his days, except they were probably finished before that.
My Father blamed Dummy’s death on Dummy’s wife. Then he blamed it on the fish. And finally he blamed himself – because he was the one that showed Dummy the ad in Field and Stream for live black bass shipped anywhere in the U.S.
It was after he got the fish that Dummy started acting peculiar. The fish changed Dummy’s whole personality. That’s what my father said..”
(Raymond Carver: “The third thing that killed my father off.”)
Compare with the other end of the continuum, the more obviously “poetic”, with internal rhyme, repetition, word-coinage, inversions, the lot, pretty much everything except lineation.
“SONNEZ!
Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable woman's warmhosed thigh.
--LA CLOCHE! cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust there.
She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren't men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.
--You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.
Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze. “
(James Joyce: Ulysses)
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